Standing on the Word of God

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I want to invite you to take out your Bibles and turn with me to 2 Timothy chapter 3 and hold your place at verse 16.
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The title of today's message is Standing on the Word of God.
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In 1985, the Jesus Seminar was organized to seek out and find the historic Jesus.
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Their goal was to examine the sayings and the deeds attributed to Jesus in the Gospels and to determine which of those were authentic.
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This is a direct quote.
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It says, the seminar met twice a year to debate technical papers that were prepared and circulated in advance, and at the close of the debate on each agenda item, fellows voted using colored beads to indicate the degree of authenticity of the words and deeds attributed to Jesus in the Gospels.
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Dropping colored beads into a box soon became a trademark of the Jesus Seminar.
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Among the findings is that in the judgment of the Jesus Seminar scholars, about 18% of the sayings and 16% of the deeds attributed to Jesus in the Gospels are indeed authentic.
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So there was a group in the mid-80s who took it upon themselves to meet together to essentially call into question everything that the Bible says Jesus ever said or did, and their conclusion throughout their so-called rigorous scholarship was that Jesus did less than 20% of what we think he did and said he did.
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What's interesting is my first year as pastor here, it was January of 2006 when I became the pastor, so I'm coming up on 18 years in January.
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Well my first year I was here I received an invitation to an event, and the event was hosted by a local Disciples of Christ church.
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Now if you're unfamiliar with our history, this church used to be connected with the Disciples of Christ.
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We're talking about years and years ago, well before I became the pastor, they were connected with the Disciples of Christ church.
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And the Disciples of Christ are very left-leaning theologically.
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I would say, well I wouldn't even say left-leaning, I would say like straight on, very left.
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Especially now, they've gone wackadoo.
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That's a technical term, wackadoo is very technical.
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But, John Dominic Crossom was speaking at a local Disciples of Christ church, and I was invited to come, unfortunately I didn't get to go, I would have loved to have gone simply to be able to at least be a voice of response to his madness, because John Dominic Crossom was one of the leaders in the Jesus Seminar.
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He was one of the men who was most well known for claiming that Jesus wasn't all that we believe that he is in the Bible, and what the Bible says about him is incorrect.
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In fact, here's another quote, Crossom believes most of the gospel was made up by early Christians to sell their reason to be Christian to others.
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He believes that Jesus was only a mortal man, conceived and born the natural way, performed no miracles, was killed, and his body was consumed by wild dogs.
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That's Crossom's position on Jesus.
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Crossom is an example of a far left view when it comes to the scriptures, and yet it's a view that is becoming more and more prevalent.
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We can't trust what the Bible says.
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It's becoming more and more common to turn on the internet or to open up a video or to see an email or something that calls into question what the Bible says, and argues that we can't have hope, we can't have trust, we can't have faith in what the scripture says.
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As you know, if you've been here, and I know some of your visitors, so welcome this morning if it's your first time with us.
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The subject we have been discussing is the subject of apologetics.
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Apologetics means to give a defense for our faith in Christ.
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And we have looked at three areas.
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We've looked at the existence and the nature of God, that was two weeks ago.
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We've looked at the person and work of Jesus, that was last week.
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And today we are going to look at the nature and reliability of the Bible.
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And might I say this, this one is the one that undergirds it all.
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Because if we can't rely on what the Bible says, then we have no idea what Jesus said.
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If we can't rely on what the Bible said, then we really not, we know not who God is.
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Because God has not communicated to us in a way that we can understand or make decisions.
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So this final week might could be said to be the most important.
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And when it comes to defending the Bible, there are a range of things that we have to address.
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One of my most favorite memories in regard to this area of apologetics was years ago I was sitting at dinner with my mother and a friend and a few other folks and we were sitting around the table.
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And during that dinner, this lady who I've known literally all my life said to me, you know I wish I could get my hands on a Bible before King James came and took out all the books that weren't there anymore.
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I had to stop eating because I was amazed at the level of, well I hate to use the word ignorance but it was, just absolute ignorance of history.
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The absolute ignorance of the history of our Bible.
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To say oh I wish I had a Bible before King James came along and changed it all.
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That is a statement that this person felt very confident to make and yet is based on so much ignorance of the history of the text that I didn't even know where to start.
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Oftentimes people will make bold claims about the Bible that just ain't so.
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And one of the best ways that we can make a defense for the Bible is knowing what the Bible is, knowing how we got it, knowing who wrote it, and knowing why we can say this is in fact the word of God.
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So four questions we're going to look at today after we read our text.
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We're going to ask these four questions.
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Number one, what does the Bible claim to be? Number two, does the Bible we possess today, the one that I'm holding in my hand, that I have on the pulpit here, does the Bible we possess today reliably translate the original writings? Number three, were the original writings reliable as historical documents? And number four, why do we believe the Bible is what it claims to be? So let's stand together.
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We're going to read 2 Timothy 3, 16 and 17.
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This is the magnum opus of verses regarding the subject of the text of the Bible.
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I would say it is one of the most important passages in regard to what the Bible is.
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And it says, Paul writing to Timothy, says, all Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work.
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Father in heaven, I thank you for your word.
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I pray even now, Lord, that I would be faithful to it as I seek to preach.
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I pray, God, that you would keep me from error.
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For the sake of your name, for the sake of my conscience, for the sake of the hearers, and for the sake of those who will hear this in the future, I pray, Lord, that you would keep me from error.
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And God, as we consider my weaknesses, I pray that your strength would come and fill this place.
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Pray that you would forgive my iniquities.
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Pray that you would make me and even prepare me even in this moment to preach aright.
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I pray that our minds would be fixed on your word and what it says.
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And I pray, by the mercy of God, that someone who came today who maybe does not know the Lord might hear the gospel and be saved.
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And Lord, that those who have come who know the Lord would be edified, challenged, corrected, exhorted, and Lord, that through it all you would be glorified.
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In Jesus' name, amen.
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Last week as I was concluding the sermon on the person and work of Jesus, I referenced a very famous quote from C.S.
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Lewis.
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C.S.
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Lewis, as you remember, is very famous for writing The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe.
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He also is famous among scholars for having written many Christian works, including the book Mere Christianity.
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In Mere Christianity, C.S.
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Lewis provides us with what is known as his trilemma.
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The trilemma, as I mentioned last week, is the threefold argument for the person and work of Christ.
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And it says this, that when you are faced with Jesus, you are faced with three questions.
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He is either a liar, a lunatic, or the Lord.
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Because, if he said what he said and he knew it wasn't true, then he was a liar.
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If he said what he said and it wasn't true, but he didn't know it, somehow a little worse, that would make him a lunatic.
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But if he said what he said and it was true, then he's the Lord.
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And that is the classic trilemma of Lewis that we all have to face.
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Who is Jesus? Is he a liar? Is he a lunatic? Is he the Lord? Well, a different argument now has been proposed by those who are opposed to Scripture, and the argument goes like this.
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We can't accept Lewis's trilemma anymore, because Lewis's trilemma is based on the sayings of Jesus, and we don't know what Jesus really said.
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Because we don't know if the Bible's true.
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You see how that goes? And that's why I say the foundation for all of what we've talked about in our discussion of apologetics has to come down to the question of the Bible, has to come down to the question of the historicity, the accuracy, the inspiration and infallibility of our Bible.
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And so, I think this is the right place to draw this series of apologetics to a close, but I will say this.
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This has been a short series, and it's short for a reason.
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My normal plan on Sunday mornings is to preach verse by verse through books of the Bible.
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I finished Colossians, and I said I was going to do a short series on apologetics, and it ends today.
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And then in October, I'm going to do a short series on the five solas of the Reformation, because every October we celebrate the Reformation here, which took place October 31st, 1517, so that begins next week.
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But then in November, we will take over in 2 Corinthians and just begin again with our verse-by-verse exposition.
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So that's where we're at.
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In a sense, this is, for me, a nice break in between books, because studying through a book is very, very time-consuming, and so this gives me an opportunity to do something in between, but still fruitful nonetheless, I hope.
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But the point is, we are looking at the subject of apologetics, and we're asking the questions that we hope are the real questions people are asking, and that's why I try to address the actual issues.
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I call this foxhole apologetics, real embattled issues.
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And one of the most important issues we face is the question of the Bible.
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And the four questions we asked already, we're going to go through them one at a time.
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These are our four points today, answering these four questions.
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The first one, what does the Bible claim to be? What does the Bible claim for itself? Well, we just read in 2 Timothy at least a starting point for what the Bible claims for itself.
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Now, we have to have some context for this passage, and it's important to understand what we are talking about when we address 2 Timothy 3.16.
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Almost everyone who talks about the Bible and talks about its reliability, when it talks about its inspiration, will go to 2 Timothy 3.16.
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As I said, this is the most important verse in regard to this subject.
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But immediately, we have to consider one thing.
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Paul is writing this verse before the New Testament existed.
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You realize that, right? Because this verse is written as part of the New Testament.
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So this verse is written before the New Testament exists.
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So therefore, when Paul uses the word Pass Grafe, which is all Scripture, he has in his mind a collection of Scriptures that at that point did not include the New Testament.
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Now I'm not calling into question the inspiration of the New Testament, and I'll show you why in a moment, but I do want us to understand the context of where Paul is in his writing.
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This is Paul's last letter, as far as we understand.
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His last letter is 2 Timothy.
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Paul began writing somewhere around the year 48 or 49, when he wrote the first letter that he wrote, which I believe is the letter to the Galatians, even though some argue Thessalonians came first, and there's some debate about that, but I personally believe that Galatians was his first letter, and 2 Timothy is his last letter.
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And so we're looking at a writing period of around 20 years for Paul, encompassing the 50s and the 60s.
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Paul certainly was passed away by a Roman sword most likely before the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70, so that would put his writing somewhere in a period of about two decades.
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So Paul is still writing the New Testament at this point.
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Other writings are being written at this point.
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We have the writings of Matthew and Mark and Luke and John would be later.
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We have the writings of other New Testament writers who we don't even know.
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We don't know who wrote the book of Hebrews, even though I'm convinced it was likely Luke.
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Some people believe it was Paul.
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We can debate that later if you want about why I think that.
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But anyhow, for lack of a better point, when Paul says pas grafe, when he says all Scripture, he at this point is referring to what the Jewish people would have referred to as the Tanakh, the Torah, the Nevi'im, and the Ketuvim, which is the law, the Psalms, and the prophets, which would make up our Old Testament.
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That's the body of work that Paul is referring to when he says all Scripture.
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So if there's ever a question in your mind, if the Old Testament is inspired by God, Paul says right here, all Scripture.
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And when he says all Scripture, he's referring to the Old Testament, which means he is putting God's seal of absolute truth on stories like Noah and stories like Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and the Exodus.
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So we may come to someone who says, well, I don't believe in the Noahic flood or I don't believe in the Exodus from Egypt by the Jews, I don't believe in this or I don't believe in that.
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We have from the words of the Apostle Paul that all of the Old Testament is in fact inspired by God.
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And we'll talk about what the word inspired means in just a moment.
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But before we get there, let us for a second address, well, what about the New Testament? Is the New Testament then not inspired? No, the New Testament is inspired.
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And we have this based upon later revelation, particularly in Peter's writing, where he actually calls Paul's writing Scripture.
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He actually calls Paul's writing Scripture, which puts it in this category of pass-graphe, of all Scripture.
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And so we have a promise, or not a promise, but an example here of calling what Paul wrote Scripture.
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And that, of course, would include the rest of the New Testament as well.
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And so when we read 2 Timothy 3.16, by context it's referring to the Old Testament, but by extension it's referring to all of our Bible.
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From Genesis all the way to Revelation would fall under the category of pass-graphe, all Scripture.
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So all Scripture is what? According to this passage, it is theopneustos.
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That is what Paul says here.
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He says all Scripture is theopneustos.
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Now the word theopneustos is a combination of two Greek words.
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Paul enjoyed making up words.
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I really believe that, because there are certain words that are in our Bible, most of them written by Paul, that are only written by Paul, they're only in one place in all of extant Greek literature, and it's where Paul wrote them, and he has a tendency to take words and mush them together, like the word ginormous.
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You know, that's in the dictionary now.
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It wasn't when I was a kid, but it is now, because someone took the words giant and enormous and combined them into ginormous, and now we have a new word which makes its way into the lexicon of the English language.
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Well, the word theopneustos comes from two Greek words.
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The first word is the word theos.
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Now the word theos means what, Bible students? God.
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Theos is where we get the word theology, which means study of God.
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It's where my son's name comes from, Theodore, which means gift from God.
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Right? The word theos used as a prefix means God.
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So theopneustos begins with God, and then the second half of the word, and I realize this may be a little difficult because it's in the Greek letters, but most of you who did math in high school remember the pi sign? Well, it's right in the middle.
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That's the Greek letter P.
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And so you'll see it's P, and the next word looks like a V, is an N.
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That is paneustos, which is from the word panuma, which means to breathe out.
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To breathe out something.
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Panuma comes from the word for breath or air.
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It's actually the same word for spirit.
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When you read about the Holy Spirit, it is the hagios panuma, the holy, hagios being the word for holy, Holy Spirit.
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So theopneustos is God breathed.
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God breathed is what that word together means.
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Now the King James Bible uses the word inspired.
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If you're reading from the King James Bible, it says all Scripture is inspired by God.
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And this is one of those times where an English word can be invested with too much meaning.
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Because inspired, when the King James writers translated the word inspired, they had the idea of breathing into something because the word expire means to breathe out.
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You think of when somebody dies, they expire.
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That means their breath goes out of them.
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And inspire means to breathe into something, right? To inspire versus to breathe out, expire, right? So when they said the Bible, all Scripture is inspired by God, they were saying it's breathed by God.
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It has His breath in it.
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It's His word.
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But nowadays, people will say, they look at a mountain, oh, the mountain is inspiring.
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Or they look at a river and they say, oh, this river is inspiring.
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Or they'll hear a play or a poem or read a book and they'll say, that book inspired me.
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So as I said, it's gotten too much meaning now.
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Because I've heard people say, I've heard Christians say that this song that I wrote is inspired the same way the book of Matthew is inspired.
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And we say, oh, nay, nay.
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That is not the same.
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Because while you may be inspired in the modern English sense of the word to write a song or write a poem or do something, when we talk about God's word being inspired, it's a very unique form of inspiration.
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It's God speaking.
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It's God's breath.
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It's God's word.
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Therefore, when we look at the Scriptures, are we looking at the writings of Moses? Yes.
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And that's why they're different than the writings of Paul in the sense of language and structure and syntax and context and how he uses words.
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So is it the writings of Moses? Yes.
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Is it the writings of David? Yes.
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Is it the writings of Paul? Yes.
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Is it the writings of John and Luke and the others? Yes.
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But all of them come from the mouth of God.
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That's what they claim for themselves.
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They claim to be God's word.
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So that's what we mean.
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When we pick up this book and we say, this is the word of the living God.
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We are saying God spoke and men wrote.
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And so we begin, what does the Bible claim for itself? It claims to be the word of God.
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Now very quickly, I want to simply point something out.
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When we ask the question, what does the Bible claim to be? The Bible claims to be the word of God and as a result of that claim, we would expect certain things of it.
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If God is the one who superintended, and that's my favorite word by the way for this subject.
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I like the word superintended.
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If the Holy Spirit of God superintended this writing, then we would expect that it would be true because God is not a liar.
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Therefore, we come to the conclusion called inerrancy.
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You know what inerrancy means? It means without error.
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But I prefer this term.
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The Bible is true because when we get into inerrancy, we can get into a lot of debate about certain things, about certain harmonization of certain passages.
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How many angels were there at the resurrection? How many this? How many that? And we can get into debate about numbers in the Old Testament and how this number and this number might conflict.
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And there are questions that need to be answered and there are things that have to be harmonized and we do that.
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In fact, Andy mentioned Wednesday nights earlier.
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We pray on Wednesday night, but we also study the word on Wednesday night and often we dive into things that we can't do here on Sunday morning because we have more time and we can dig down and we can dig a little deeper and look at some of those things.
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And so there are times where we ask questions about, okay, how do we harmonize this with this? But at the end of the day, our answer is we believe that it's true because God is the author of truth and He's not a liar.
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So inspiration comes with infallibility.
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It's true because God tells the truth.
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If the word came from God, then it is true.
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That make sense? So that's what I said.
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When we say, what is it? What is it? What does it claim to be? It claims to be the word of God, which comes with a even more powerful claim and that is that means it's the truth.
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Therefore, if you come to me and we're discussing the word of God and we have a different understanding of some passage, that's fine.
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We can discuss how we may differ on a certain passage.
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That's, I mean, I'm not infallible.
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The Bible is, but I'm not.
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But if I and you are talking about something and you say, well, I just don't believe that, that's where we get off the bus because that's a different argument.
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When we say the word of God says this, you have a different understanding.
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Let's discuss that.
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That's one thing.
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But if you say, well, I just don't believe that's true, then we're no longer on the same bus because the bus here starts and stops at the Bible is true because if the Bible ain't true, ain't got no reason to come.
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If the Bible ain't true, ain't got no reason to do what I'm doing.
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Why exegete something that we don't trust? Why base our life on something that can't be trusted, right? So what does the Bible claim to be? It claims to be the trustworthy word of God.
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That's what it claims to be.
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So that leads to the next question.
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Well, does the Bible we possess today reliably transmit what was originally written? You say, well, why is that question here? Well, the reason why this question is here is because what is often claimed by those who oppose Scripture is that, well, the Bible may have been true when it was written, but you have no idea what was written because that was 2,000 years ago and just like the old telephone game that all of us played when we were in school where I tell Dale something about someone and he tells Rick and Rick tells Tim and Tim tells Matt and by the time Matt gets home to Kayla, that story done changed 15 times.
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Not because of Matt, but because of everybody involved.
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And so the argument is that the Bible is not trustworthy today because we don't have confidence in what it originally said.
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The problem with that is that it just ain't so.
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There's a Greek word for it.
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What is it, church? Baloney.
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That's my favorite Greek word.
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Because the Bible we possess today has been amazingly preserved from its original writings.
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And I would say this is particularly true of the New Testament.
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The Old Testament has been miraculously preserved as well, but within the New Testament, this is not even a question.
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As I said earlier, the New Testament was written in the first century.
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I believe it was written before AD 70.
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Some people believe some of the books like Revelation and John came as late as the 80s or 90s.
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I'm willing to concede the possibility of that, though I don't agree.
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I hold an interesting view of inspiration.
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I believe all the inspiration ended at the fall of Jerusalem, but that's another conversation, as I said.
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But the manuscript fragments that we possess now, though we no longer possess any of the originals, by the way, we don't.
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There is nowhere like a secret room in the Vatican where they're holding the original Matthew.
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That doesn't exist.
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It just ain't there.
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But what we do have is we have a historical line of manuscript evidence which is more thorough, more full, and more preserved than any other work of ancient literature by far.
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It's not even like, well, they have this much and we have this much.
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No, they have the microphone.
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We have the stage, chancel, it's not a stage, it's a chancel.
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We have the platform.
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We have the church compared to this microphone.
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I'll give you an example.
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Here's something you may be interested in seeing, and some of you with bad eyes, I apologize because this is a little small, but this is some examples of some of the writing that took place around the time of the New Testament.
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The New Testament, as I said, was written somewhere between the years 48 and we'll say 90 at the latest, right? We have early writings, early copies that can be found and looked at today, manuscript papyri pieces that go all the way back to the second century, which is within a generation or two of the original.
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Within a generation or two of the original.
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If you look at other writings of similar time, like Homer's Iliad, Homer's Iliad was written around 900 years before Christ.
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There are 643 copies.
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We have over 5,000 copies.
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That's not even in the same ballpark as far as the amount, and it's the biggest.
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If you look at the rest, Plato, we have seven, Aristotle, we have 40, Caesar's Gallic Wars, we have 10, the Annals of Tacitus, we have three, Herodotus has 75, the living history of Rome, 27.
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Not even close to the manuscript evidence that we have in the New Testament, and that's only manuscripts.
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That does not include lectionaries, which were essentially worship folders that were used by the early church that were used for worship that had writing of scripture in them.
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We have those.
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We have the writings of the ancient church fathers, the early church fathers which lived in the first, second, third, and fourth centuries, and their writings when compiled, if you looked at all of the commentaries that they wrote, the entire New Testament can be reconstructed just from their commentaries.
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So even if we had no manuscripts, we would have enough evidence in the commentaries to be able to reconstruct a completed New Testament.
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We also have other languages.
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The Bible was almost immediately translated into Coptic, Syriac, and Latin, and those manuscripts go back to the first, second, third, and fourth centuries.
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The idea that we can't know what was originally written, if we can't know what was written in the New Testament, we can't know anything about the ancient world, because there's more evidence for the history of the New Testament than any other writing by far.
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We've hit it out of the park.
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We have Babe Ruth style.
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We have hit the home run every time.
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This is one of the things that God has done in the preservation of his word to help us to answer the question, well, can we know what was originally said? Can we know what was originally written? Yes, we can.
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Now, there does exist something called variance, and I don't have time this morning.
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I can smell the food just as well as y'all can.
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I don't have time to explain all about textual variation, but I have taught classes.
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I've taught many classes on the subject of textual variation in our academy.
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I've taught them on Wednesday nights.
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I know Jackie's been on those, Pat and Dad, you've been in some of them and heard me teach on the subject of textual variation.
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Let me just say this very simply.
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When you have more manuscripts, and they're all handwritten, by the way.
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The copier didn't exist until the 20th century, so everything that was written, oh, and movable type printing didn't exist until the 14th century, so everything before that was handwritten.
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Every single piece of literature that existed before the time of Gutenberg was handwritten.
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Unless you lived in China, they did have movable type prior to Gutenberg, but in this debate, they don't really count because they weren't producing Bibles.
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So in this regard, every Bible that we possess prior to the 1400s was written by hand.
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That includes the first English Bible that was written by John Wycliffe, which was a translation from Latin.
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Every one of those that was sent out was sent out written by hand.
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Can you imagine? That would be your job.
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Handwriting Bibles.
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And every time we discover a new manuscript, we have manuscript that has textual variation because when something is written by hand, it introduces mistakes from the person who's writing it.
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And that does exist.
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And therefore, we have things like misspelled words.
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Do you misspell words? Aren't you thankful for a spell check? Well, they didn't have spell check.
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So there are times where we will find misspelled words.
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Not a huge deal.
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There are times when we will find words that are in different order.
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Is it Jesus Christ or Christ Jesus? It doesn't matter.
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It doesn't change anything.
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And we call those meaningless variants.
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Meaningless variants, meaning they don't change any meaning, they don't change anything about the text, but what they do do is they introduce a variant, therefore, when you hear someone claim, there's over 150,000 variants in the New Testament, and there's only 140,000 words, which means there's more variants than there are words in the New Testament.
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That's actually true.
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But it depends on how you're counting them.
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Are you counting the meaningful variants only? Because when you do that, it drops ridiculously low.
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Because the meaningful variants make up less than 3% of the New Testament.
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And the ones that are viable, meaning they are actually possibly part of the original, go down to less than 1%.
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So that's why when you're reading your Bible, every once in a while, if you're reading an ESV or a New American Standard or something like that, you'll see a little footnote, and it will say at the bottom, it will say, some manuscripts delete this word, or some manuscripts don't include this word.
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That's what it's referring to.
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It's referring to the fact that we have more manuscripts than ever in history, and those manuscripts have been examined, and those manuscripts have been seen as, some of them are really good, some of them are really bad, some come from very early, some come from very late, and when all the evidence is compiled and looked at, we come down to just a few major variants.
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And if you want more on this, please come see me.
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I'll send you a link on when I've taught on this, because there are three major textual variants, the Kamiohanim, the Pirkepeia Adulterae, and the longer ending of Mark, which are probably the three most problematic that we deal with as far as variations.
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But aside from that, I can still step back and say this is true.
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Because we have all of the manuscripts, we can look it up, nothing's being hidden, there is no cloak and dagger where somebody's hiding in a room going, I'm going to hide the Bible.
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Nobody did that.
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When everybody claims that Constantine came along and he hid the Bible from the people, and he stole the Word of God, and he changed it, that is a lie.
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One, Constantine did nothing to determine what books go in our Bible.
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That is a lie, that lie has been spit out so many times I get tired of hearing it, because it just ain't so.
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We actually know what Constantine did, we know what happened, we know what happened at the Council of Nicaea.
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What was debated at the Council of Nicaea was whether or not Arius was a heretic, it had nothing to do with what books should be in the Bible.
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And so the argument, again, I said I wasn't going to spend a lot of time on variants, let me just back up and say, if you want to know more, please ask.
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Because this is a question, when people say, we don't know what the Bible originally said, absolutely we do.
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Absolutely we do.
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If you want to look at a Greek Bible, just come to my office, I'll show you one this afternoon and you can look at what we have.
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So third question, okay, if we know we have the original writings, the second question, if we know that what we possess today reliably transmits what was written, that goes to the next question, well how do we know that the original writings were reliable? And that gets back to the heart of who wrote them.
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Who wrote the New Testament, beloved? Was it one man in a cave somewhere, by himself? No, that's Islam.
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Don't get offended, that is Islam.
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The Koran was dictated, not written, because Muhammad was illiterate, and that's not a shot at him, it's the truth, it's historically factual that Muhammad did not read or write, he spoke the Koran and it was written by essentially a secretary or someone, like an amanuensis, someone who wrote, took dictation for him.
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And he believes that he received his revelations about God alone, by himself.
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That is not what we have in the Bible.
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What we have in the Bible is we have 66 books written over a period of 1500 years, written by over 40 different authors in three different languages, and all of them give us the same testimony from beginning to end.
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I couldn't take 40 people in this room and get us to agree on much, especially over a period of 40 years in three different languages.
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But the Bible has a consistent testimony throughout.
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And here's something about the historicity of the Bible, and this is an important claim.
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William Mitchell Ramsey, who was Oxford's first professor of classical art and archaeology, originally accepted the German scholarly premise that the Acts of the Apostles, which was written by Luke, was a second century work of fiction.
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He believed it was a second century work filled with errors.
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And he announced he was going to prove it.
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However, as he began to research the book of Acts, as he began to go and actually put spades in the ground in Turkey, which is Asia Minor, that's where Paul was going through as he was doing his missionary journeys.
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As he began to do that, after dig, after dig, after dig, spanning 15 years, he accumulated evidence not denying the accounts of Luke, but actually supporting them to the point that he actually became a Christian because he realized that what the Bible said was accurate to history.
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Here's a quote directly from his book entitled St.
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Paul the Traveler.
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He says, quote, our hypothesis is that Acts was written by a great historian, a writer who set himself to record the facts as they occurred, a strong partisan indeed, but raised above partiality by his perfect confidence that he had only to describe the facts as they occurred in order to make the truth of Christianity and the honor of Paul apparent.
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Notice what he's saying.
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He's saying he, yes, Luke certainly was partisan, sure, but he was telling the truth.
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It's so funny because there were years and years and years.
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There was a city that Luke had mentioned in the book of Acts.
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I don't remember what the city name, I could look it up, but it was a city that was mentioned in Acts and scholars used to make fun of the Bible because they didn't believe that city ever existed.
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And every time that city would come up, they'd say, ha ha, that just goes to show you that the writers of the Bible just didn't care about accuracy, they didn't care about historicity, they didn't care about those things.
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And then one day, an archeologist spade went into the ground and unearthed what literally was like a, here lies this city, it was like, you know, it wasn't Bethlehem, but like, Bethlehem, you know, population, it was like the city sign and they pulled it out of the ground and all of the arguments that had been made up until that point were shown themselves to be foolish.
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The Bible proclaims to us an accurate history.
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It has been preserved through time for us that we can know what God has said.
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Were the original writings reliable as historical documents? The answer is absolutely, absolutely.
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In fact, I would go as far as to say this.
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Many of the men who wrote it died for it.
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And some don't like this argument, but I'm going to make it anyway.
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Many men will die for a lie, but no one will die for a lie if they know it's a lie.
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People die for lies all the time.
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I mean, going back to Islam, people die for Islam, Islam is a lie.
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But these men were dying, not proclaiming a belief in Jesus, but proclaiming they had seen Him.
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They were proclaiming they had walked with Him.
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They were proclaiming that this man, Jesus, rose and we have beheld Him.
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And they went to their death, many of them to a man, terrible deaths, proclaiming that thing.
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So this leads us to our final question.
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Why do we believe the Bible is what it claims to be? Right away I would say we have every reason to believe what the Bible claims about itself, but I want to add a thought into your mind.
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The Bible is self-authenticating.
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What does that mean? We not only have a wealth of historical data which testifies to its truth, but the Bible itself has internal markings of divine inspiration.
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That's called self-authentication.
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It doesn't need us to put a spade in the ground and pull up the sign.
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It has enough within it to prove its own truth.
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The beauty, excellency, power, efficacy, unity, harmony, which marks the Scripture, is testimony to divine, not human, origin.
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And within the Bible it makes claims that something will happen and then that thing happens.
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We call that prophetic utterance.
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And the most important of those prophetic utterances were made about the Lord Jesus Christ.
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Hundreds and even thousands of years before Jesus Christ stepped foot on this rock, God promised that He was going to send His Son to crush the head of the serpent.
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And throughout the Old Testament there are over 300 specific prophecies about the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ, each perfectly fulfilled in His life.
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Years ago a lady visited our church.
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My office used to be where the nursery is, so it was right off the sanctuary there.
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And after service she came to me and asked if she could speak with me, so we stepped into my office and she sat down at my desk.
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And she said, I appreciate the sermon.
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We had a pleasant little introduction.
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And she said, I want you to know that I just don't know if the Bible is true.
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I just don't know if I can trust what the Bible says.
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And I said, I understand the world is anxious to get you to not trust what the Bible says, and I understand why you would say that.
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I said, but I want to read something to you.
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May I read to you a passage of the Bible? And she says yes.
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So I read to her the passage in the Bible where it says, All we like sheep have gone astray.
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We have all turned, each one to his own way.
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And God has laid upon him the iniquity of us all.
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And I said, who is that talking about? And she said, oh, that's about Jesus.
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I said, yes, ma'am, it is.
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But it was written 700 years before he was born.
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It's from the book of Isaiah chapter 53.
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The Bible authenticates itself because it's the word of God.
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You ever wonder why we gather around this book every week? Because it's the word of God.
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Why is the pulpit in the center of the room? Because we focus our attention on God speaking to us.
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All Scripture is inspired by God and is profitable for teaching and for rebuke and for correction and for training in righteousness that the man of God may be equipped for every good work.
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Beloved, we have a Bible worth standing on.
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Let's pray.
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Father, I thank you for your word.
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I thank you for its truth.
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I know, Lord, there are many areas and things that we did not get to talk about today.
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And, Lord, we could go another, we could go the whole day.
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We could go hours and hours and not dive and plumb the depths of this subject.
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But I do pray at the very minimum that we have been reminded today why we believe the word of God is true and why we choose to stand upon it.
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And, Lord, now as we turn our attention to what Jesus has given us as a reminder of his sacrifice made for us, I pray now, Lord, that believers would be reminded of the importance of the work of Christ in our life, bringing salvation to all who believe.
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And, Lord, for those who have not yet turned from sin and turned to Christ, that this would be to them a reminder that there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved than the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.
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And it's in his name we pray.
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Amen.